– IN PRESS –
My forthcoming contribution to an anthology in press, “Catching Bullets with Buttocks: the ‘obscene’ African power of Queen Nanny of the Jamaican Maroons” traces the use of “Female Genital Power” in Caribbean history.
Leader of first successful slave rebellion in the Caribbean:
“Queen” Nanny was the legendary 17th c. leader of the Jamaican Windward Maroons, a community of formerly enslaved Africans who escaped to the hills. Under her leadership, they successfully repelled repeated attempts by British colonizers to recapture and subdue them. Eventually the British made a peace treaty granting the Windward Maroons their freedom and land rights in perpetuity. In 1975 the Jamaican government recognized Nanny as Jamaica’s national hero and her portrait, emblazoned on the Jamaican 500 dollar note, became an emblem of their proud heritage.
Bizarre legends of magical power:
Nanny’s reputation as a fearless warrior was cemented by fantastic stories, traditional sayings, and songs about the magical powers that made her invincible. According to this lore, Nanny turned her back on the advancing British forces, stooped, lifted her skirts, and caught their bullets with her buttocks!
These startling stories are a stumbling block for scholars: Jamaican nationalists and scholars, eager to preserve the dignity of this figure of proud defiance, don’t know what to do with this fantastical folklore. Nanny’s exploits are both incredible and, for some, “obscene.”
Connections to African spiritual ritual:
Drawing on my book, An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa (Duke 2018), I argue that the African-born Nanny was drawing on an ancient ritual knowledge of certain African female elders. These women make a ritual appeal to their genitals as the locus of spiritual power. To this day, African women use the rite as a form of spiritual warfare to strengthen the moral community and mortify the enemy. The rite also acts as public rebuke of any who violate the moral order.
I establish a direct link between Nanny’s reputedly obscene self-exposure and this documented African tradition to reveal that her “obscene” gestures had profound spiritual significance; Nanny bore the Akan title of living ancestor (nana). Her notorious acts demonstrate the tenacious potency of African religious engagement in the diaspora.
To read the draft in press:
